you must have known I was trying to find you--that I was doing
everything possible!"

"I knew nothing," she answered, in her poignantly emotionless voice.
And the thought swept through Durkin that something within her had
withered and died during those last grim weeks of suffering.

"But here--how did you get here--and what's this Lady Boxspur
business?" he still insisted.

"Yes, yes," she almost moaned, "if you'll only wait I'll tell you. But
is it safe to stay here? Have you thought where we are?"

"Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet."

"Why didn't you send me money, or help me?" she asked, in her dead and
unhappy monotone.

"I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a penny left. I didn't
know the damned language. I prowled about like a cat in a strange
garret, but I tried everything, from the American consul at Nice to a
_Herald_ correspondent at San Remo. Then I got word of a consumptive
young writer from New York, at Mentone--but he died the day I was to
meet him. Then I heard of the new Marconi station up the coast, and
worked at wireless for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before they
sacked me for not being able to send a message out to a Messina
fruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I chanced on the job of doctoring up a
generator on an American yacht down here in the bay."

"Yes, yes--I know how hard it is!"

"But listen! When I was on board at work I overheard a Supreme Court
judge and a special agent from the Central Office in New York and two
English detectives talking over the loss of certain securities. And
those securities belong to Richard Penfield!"

He knew that she had started, at the sound of that name.

"Penfield!" she gasped. "What of him?"

"When the district-attorney's men raided Penfield's New York gambling
club, one of Penfield's new men got away with all his papers. They had
been withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe Deposit Company, for they
were mostly cheques and negotiable securities, worth about two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face value, they
constituted _prima facie_ evidence against the gambler."

"But what's all this to us, now?"

"They were smuggled to New Jersey. There the Jersey City chief of
police took action, and this agent of Penfield's carried the documents
across the North River and up to Stamford. From there he got back to
New York again, by night, where he met a second agent, who had secured
passage on the